Just
before noon today on CNN, Maine Democratic activist Tom Connolly, who gave the
reporter the documentation about Bush's 1976 drunk driving arrest,
proclaimed that spreading the story was "an act of democracy." The
networks certainly couldn't resist Connolly's juicy tidbit, a Campaign
2000 Media Reality Check distributed by fax this afternoon documented.

To read the report by the MRC's Rich Noyes,
"Media Promote Last-Minute Anti-Bush Hit Job: Despite Being Smeared With
Democratic Fingerprints, Networks Hype Story of Bush's 1976 Arrest," in
the format seen by fax recipients, call up the Adobe Acrobat PDF file:http://www.mediaresearch.org/realitycheck/2000/pdf/fax1103.pdf

The pull-out quote in the middle of the faxed page:

And How Many Would Die Under Gore?
"The fact is it allows people who are independent, who are Republican,
who are Democrats, to evaluate who should be the next President. And recollect
that more than 25,000 Americans a year die from drunk driving, and that's a
big deal. If you add that up, four years, that's 100,000 Americans that are
going to be dead during this guy's first term." -- Democratic activist
Tom Connolly, the media's source for new anti-Bush charges, CNN interview,
November 3.

Erin Fehlau, a reporter at WPXT-TV Channel 51 in Portland, Maine, was last
night's featured guest on ABC's Nightline. Earlier that evening, she
triggered a feeding frenzy by disclosing that George W. Bush was arrested and
pleaded guilty to drunk driving in 1976. Ted Koppel asked her to declare that
her story wasn't what it obviously was: a late-campaign Democratic smear
plot.

"The way you tell the story, it certainly sounds as though you just
stumbled into something and were smart enough to follow up on it," Koppel
assured Fehlau. "But you also heard Gov. Bush say several times, you
know, he's got his suspicions."

"I'm confident I wasn't set up," Fehlau obtusely replied,
though she acknowledged her source was a lawyer who also was "a delegate
to the Democratic convention." She added that "I feel like if I was
being set up, he would probably have just handed me the information right off
the bat."

Fehlau refused to name her source, but he quickly stepped forward. Tom
Connolly, the Democratic candidate for Governor in Maine's last election,
under-mined Fehlau's claim that she wasn't set up. He told Fox News on
Friday that he hoped to plant the story with the Associated Press, and told
CNN that Fehlau got it only because Gore's fax machine was busy.

Connolly grandly thrust himself into the center of the presidential
election, pronouncing on CNN shortly before noon that "My role is to
release information that I consider germane to the decision-making
process," and spreading the story was "an act of democracy."

The courts had long ago expunged Bush's conviction from his criminal
record, but releasing the legally irrelevant information "makes me a good
citizen," Connolly crowed to CNN's Daryn Kagan.

Before they raised a finger to establish this story's partisan pedigree,
reporters were using guilt-by-association tactics to smear Bush further, even
as they feigned sympathy. "I never identify with George W. so much as I
do tonight. It's like a cheater who gets caught, and then he blames the
person who told his wife he was cheating," CNBC's Geraldo Rivera told
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter last night on Rivera Live.

"The Clinton experience is a reminder that the past has a way of
catching up with these people and biting them in the ankle," Alter
replied. "And I'm not sure the American people want another blind date
at this point." Geraldo fantasized about other possibilities: "What
if he beat up his girlfriend and he said that was some youthful indiscretion?
What if he snorted cocaine? What if he shot up heroin?"

On the same show, MSNBC's Chip Reid related that reporters covering Bush
were giddy at the prospect of additional embarrassments. "The reporters
were all chattering about this and saying 'Wait a minute! If he's got this
skeleton in his closet, what else is there?' And some were saying
'Remember, he never answered those questions about hard drugs?'"

There's been zero evidence to support hard drug use, but the media
nevertheless heavily promoted the tale last summer. Now, the gossip is being
revived by reporters as they race to cover a last-minute story, peddled by a
Democratic activist, that they couldn't resist.

They are not judicious. They are not moderate. By their very pattern of
time allocation, devoting an entire Nightline and much of today's morning
shows to this wisp of an old story, they are serving the Democratic party,
casting the campaign picture pack to the Dubya-drubbing soap opera When I Was
Young and Irresponsible, I Was Young and Irresponsible.

Make no mistake about it: the media have been handed solid evidence of
Bush's drunk-driving arrest, and Bush has admitted the offense. But the media
have not required solid evidence in the past to justify last-minute attack
segments on surging Republican candidates.

Eight years ago, at this very stage in the campaign, the Friday before
Election Day, as tracking polls suggested as small as a two-point lead for
Bill Clinton, Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh re-indicted
former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and asserted then-Vice President
George Bush was "in the loop" on Iran-Contra essentials. In the
interest of supposedly staying above the partisan fray, ABC, CBS, and NBC did
not mention Mr. Walsh by name, obscuring the extremely political tactic as the
unsuspicious emergence of "new material" or "new grand jury
evidence." In the days to come, the media had next to zero interest
in examining whether Walsh acted appropriately, and why the Clinton campaign
released a multi-page analysis of the indictment dated October 29 -- the day
before the indictment was disclosed.

But Walsh was not alone in trying to sandbag President Bush. Six days
before the election, there was the alleged judicious moderator Ted Koppel. He
declared that 18 months of ABC's searching had revealed a series of
"legal and illegal technology transfers" to Iraq. He cited network
poll numbers citing the politically crippling issue for Bush: "Indeed,
last week a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll
showed that 68 percent of the American public has major doubts about George
Bush's explanation of his administration's role in providing aid to Saddam
Hussein before the Persian Gulf war." Koppel had aired at least eight
shows in 1991 and 1992 exploring the intricacies of the Iraqgate conspiracy
theory, and while he interviewed five Democrats and Iraqgate promoter and
reporter Alan Friedman on these programs, Sen. Arlen Specter was the only
Republican guest, on the earliest Iraqgate show. (He also fit in an hour-long
special on the "October Surprise" conspiracy theory during that
time.)

Koppel concluded his late-hit scandal program with senators David Boren and
Patrick Leahy charging a Bush cover-up. Koppel emphasized this issue could not
be dismissed as political: "It is easy enough, given the political
season, to dismiss charges of a cover-up coming as they do from two Democratic
senators as purely partisan. As I told you at the beginning of the broadcast,
though, a number of serious news organizations have been pursuing [the Italian
bank] BNL and the Iraqgate story for almost two years. And in a campaign where
trust has been made into such a central theme, this story is no trivial
issue."

Then there was 60 Minutes. On October 25, 1992, nine days before the
election, CBS's Lesley Stahl devoted an entire segment to chasing Ross Perot's
bizarre charges of Republican dirty tricks: "Several of us who did know
what he was talking about had already looked into his charges and found
nothing to report, until we heard that Perot was claiming he got out of the
race last July because of a bizarre story he said he'd heard from a
high-placed Republican he won't name -- and a shadowy character he does name. The story? That the Bush campaign was planning to
sabotage his daughter's wedding."

Stahl conceded later in the story: "Even as he's making this charge,
Perot acknowledges he can't prove it. And we haven't found
any proof either."

The obvious question for any journalist: "Then why in blazes are you
putting this segment on the air?"

On Sunday, November 1, two days before the 1992 election, 60 Minutes star
Mike Wallace promoted the charges of goofball liberal Rep. Henry Gonzalez (D.,
Texas) -- who regularly called for Ronald Reagan and George Bush to be
impeached -- that Bush and his aides were guilty of obstruction of justice and
were "principally responsible for arming Saddam Hussein."

Wallace began: "If you have trouble understanding exactly what it is
that people mean when they say Iraqgate, perhaps you'll understand it better
after you hear from the man who has probed into it longer than anyone else in
Washington, the chairman. He has never talked about it as fully and freely as
he does tonight." Wallace's first question to Gonzalez: "Who are the
main players who have tried to stop your investigation?"

It did not matter that the Iraqgate allegations crumbled after the
election, in addition to the 1980 "October Surprise" allegations.
There were no apologies or retractions from the Koppels and Wallaces, just the
continued pretense that they were the objective referees of the election
process.

It bears repeating that there were many unproven stories circulating around
Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1992 that could have been the subject of a
20-minute report, or an 18-month investigation. Whitewater died in April. Al
Gore's mysterious service in Vietnam went completely untouched, unlike Dan
Quayle's record four years before. The Juanita Broaddrick story was
circulating at that time. When President Bush suggested on CNN that Clinton
ought to level with the public on his record as an anti-war protester in
England who took a trip to Moscow, the media were
inflamed. On the October 8, 1992 Nightline, Koppel took the night off, but
substitute Chris Wallace complained: "In the end, we always knew it would
come to this. For all the talk about how this campaign would be different,
about how this time the politicians would stick to the issues, there was
always the suspicion it wouldn't last. And the fact is, it hasn't."

The Nightline philosophy in a nutshell: spend months trying to prove Bush
armed Saddam Hussein and conspired to leave American hostages in Iranian
hellholes for electoral gain, no foul. Suggest Clinton explain his Vietnam War
activities, since no network reporter would spend months on that, big foul.

In this election cycle, Koppel and his associates have been long exposed as
ridiculous hypocrites on the issue of youthful indiscretions. Koppel's
Nightline devoted an entire show in August 1999 to the rumors of Bush cocaine
use, with no evidence and no accusers. Koppel lectured: "Why not accept
his one-size-fits-all declaration that when I was young and irresponsible, I
was young and irresponsible? Perhaps, we might say, because he has never
accepted youth and irresponsibility as legitimate excuses for illegal
behavior."

In January, Newsweek reporter Bill Turque reported in his book Inventing Al
Gore that Gore friend John Warnecke said Gore smoked marijuana with him
regularly in Tennessee in the 1970s, right up to running for Congress in 1976.
Gore responded to the Warnecke allegations with a very similar-sounding dodge:
"When I was young, I did things young people do; when I grew up I put
away childish things." Koppel suggested Bush was applying for
Hypocrite-in-Chief. But the Gore allegations have never been touched by Honest
Broker Ted.

In the February 14, 2000 Newsweek, Turque added: "Warnecke and two other close friends from Gore's Nashville days say
Gore was an enthusiastic recreational user,
smoking sometimes as often as three or four times a week: afterhours at
Warnecke's house, on weekends at the Gore farm or canoeing on the Caney Fork
River. Andy Schlesinger, a former Tennessean reporter who remains close to the
Gores (he celebrated with them last week in New Hampshire), says that in the
first few months after Gore returned from South Vietnam in 1971, he smoked
with him 'at least a dozen times' at the Warneckes'. The partying continued,
according to Warnecke and a Gore friend who declined to be named, until Gore
ran his first House race in 1976."

Bill Turque wasn't handed this information from stealthy Republican
sources. He interviewed Gore friends and published the story in a major
national newsmagazine. But the television networks treated this story, much
more corroborated than anything about Bush's alleged use of hard drugs, as if
it never existed.

Every feeding frenzy of the fall campaign has originated from the Gore
fans: the RATS fracas, the completely spontaneous Can Lady follies of Winifred
Skinner, the last-minute four-Democrat report from the Rand Corporation, and
now the DUI dustup. Every one of these stories underlines what everyone who
follows politics knows: The major media is never more in bed with the
Democrats than in the last few weeks of a tough campaign.

The current
media hoopla reminded me of how the networks back in August 1999 picked up on
unsubstantiated charges of drug use by George W. Bush after having spent the
Spring avoiding Juanita Broaddrick's charge that Bill Clinton raped her when
he was 32 -- two years older than Bush was at the time of his drunk driving
arrest.

An op-ed I (Brent Baker) wrote for the August 23, 1999
Washington Times best encapsulates the coverage contrast in a reasonable
number of words, so below is a reprint of the piece titled: "Bush Talks,
Clinton Walks." To read it online, go to:http://www.mediaresearch.org/oped/washtimes19990823.asp

Here's the text:

No one has claimed to have witnessed George W. Bush use cocaine or any
other illegal drug, but that didn't stop reporters over the past weeks from
repeatedly pressing him for a definitive answer about his alleged history of
drug abuse. That media interest in a rumor about possible criminal acts
committed decades ago stands in stark contrast to the media's widespread
refusal to pursue the charge by Juanita Broaddrick that Bill Clinton sexually
assaulted her in 1978.

The drug questions were fueled in late July by a week-long profile of Mr.
Bush in the Washington Post. Reporters Lois Romano and George Lardner
insisted, "We need to ask the cocaine question. We think you believe that
a politician should not let stories fester. So why won't you just deny that
you've used cocaine?" ABC invited Ms. Romano to be a guest on the July
27 edition of "Good Morning America" to dismiss Mr. Bush's answer:
"He's basically declared that his life began at 40 and that we're
supposed to not ask about that other fellow before 40 and I don't know if he
can hold to that position."

No such invitation to appear on a network news show materialized after Ms.
Romano interviewed Mrs. Broaddrick back in late February for a Post story
which ran four days before Mrs. Broaddrick recounted her charge on the Feb. 24
edition of "Dateline NBC."

That long-delayed interview with Lisa Myers failed to spark network
television coverage. Indeed, CBS's "This Morning" has yet to
mention her name and ABC's "Good Morning America" has never aired
a story or full interview segment, though the show briefly raised her name one
day in a larger interview. The closest "NBC Nightly News" came was
an end-of-the-show plug for that night's "Dateline" segment, but
Tom Brokaw only referred to how the show
would feature "controversial allegations" in "an exclusive
interview with the woman known as Jane Doe No. 5, Juanita Broaddrick."
The following weekend the ABC, CNN, Fox and NBC Sunday morning interview shows
all discussed Mrs. Broaddrick but even that failed to generate any mention on
the broadcast-network morning or evening shows.

Three weeks later, at Mr. Clinton's first solo press conference in ten
months, in 21 questions posed only ABC's Sam Donaldson asked about Mrs.
Broaddrick, leading to "World News Tonight's" first mention of her
name, but neither CBS or NBC uttered a syllable about her in their summaries
of the March 19 press conference. At this point the "CBS Evening
News" hadn't mentioned Mrs. Broaddrick since its only story on a
Saturday in February, but instead of broaching her charge, anchor John Roberts
highlighted how Mr. Clinton "said he and Mrs. Clinton love each other
very much."

In contrast to an eyewitness accusing Mr. Clinton of committing a felony,
there is no one accusing Mr. Bush of drug use, but nonetheless last week
reporters kept demanding he answer drug questions and then treated the very
occurrence of the queries as justification for news stories. On Thursday
night, Aug. 19, ABC anchor Charlie Gibson asserted "the question is
dogging his otherwise smooth campaign." NBC anchor Brian Williams called
it "the question that will not go away." (Mr. Bush's evolving
answer during the week, in which he expanded his drug-free years from seven to
25, gave the networks a convenient story hook, but Mr. Clinton's evasive
press conference answer about Mrs. Broaddrick -- "There's been a
statement made by my attorney. He speaks for me, and I think he spoke quite
clearly" -- did not motivate them to pursue her charge.)

Viewers of Thursday's "NBC Nightly News" were treated to three
minutes on the subject and ABC's "World News Tonight" gave it
three and a half minutes -- which is exactly three minutes and three and a
half minutes more time than the two shows devoted in February or early March
to Mrs. Broaddrick's charge. The "CBS Evening News" aired a piece
for the second consecutive night on Thursday on the drug issue, thus giving
twice as much attention to

Mr. Bush and drugs as to Mrs. Broaddrick. Thursday morning ABC's
"Good Morning America" brought aboard former Clinton adviser George
Stephanopoulos to analyze the controversy and NBC's "Today" ran a
pre-taped interview with Mr. Bush during which the interviewer raised the drug
question. "Today" returned Friday with a discussion about media
coverage.

Don't count on members of the media to realize their hypocrisy. Thursday
afternoon on MSNBC, the Republican National Committee's Cliff May tried to
point out the media's "double standard," since "we have right
now a credible allegation by Juanita Broaddrick that while Attorney General
Bill Clinton sexually assaulted her and he won't answer." Host David
Gregory cut him off: "Now hold on. You know what Cliff, I'm not going
to let you go there. We are not talking
about this today. We're not going to turn that into this."

>>>
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